If wormholes exist, they could magnify up to 100,000 times the light of distant objects – and this could be the key to finding them.
Wormholes are theoretical funnel-shaped portals through which matter (or perhaps spacecraft) could travel great distances. To imagine a wormhole, suppose the whole universe is a sheet of paper. If your starting point was a point at the top of the sheet and your destination was a point at the bottom of the sheet, the wormhole would appear if you bend that sheet of paper so that the two points meet. You can traverse the entire sheet in an instant, rather than traversing the entire length of the sheet.
The existence of wormholes has never been proven, but physicists have nonetheless spent decades theorizing what these exotic objects might look like and how they might behave. In their new paper, the researchers built a model to simulate an electrically charged spherical wormhole and its effects on the universe around it. The researchers wanted to know if wormholes could be detected by their observed effects on their surroundings. Their research was published Jan. 19 in the journal Physical Review D (opens in a new tab).
Related: The hunt for wormholes: how scientists search for space-time tunnels
The researchers’ model shows that wormholes, if they exist, could be massive enough to trigger an aspect of Einstein’s theory of relativity: that extremely massive objects bend the fabric of spacetime at a degree such that they cause light to bend. This curved light magnifies whatever lies behind the massive object, seen from our vantage point on Earth. This phenomenon is known as “microlensing” and allows scientists to use massive objects, like galaxies and black holes, to see extremely distant objects, like stars and galaxies in the early universe.
In the paper, the researchers claim that wormholes, like black holes, would be massive enough to magnify distant objects behind them.
“The magnification via distortion by a wormhole can be very large, which could be tested one day,” said the study’s lead author, Lei-Hua Liu. (opens in a new tab)a physicist from Jishou University in Hunan, China, told Live Science in an email.
Liu also noted that wormholes would magnify objects differently than black holes, meaning scientists could tell the two apart. For example, microlensing through a black hole is known to produce four mirror images of the object behind it. Microlensing through a wormhole, on the other hand, would produce three images: two dark and one very bright, according to the authors’ simulations.
However, because other objects – like galaxies, black holes and stars – also produce a microlensing effect, finding a wormhole without a clear clue as to where to start looking would be a difficult undertaking, Andreas Karch (opens in a new tab)a University of Texas at Austin physicist who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email.
Trying to disentangle microlensing caused by a wormhole from other large objects would be like “trying to distinguish the soft voice of a single person in the middle of a rock concert,” Karch said. He also noted that while the authors of the paper come up with an interesting theoretical way to identify wormholes, “they don’t even talk about how to do it in practice yet – that’s future work” .
Although wormholes are still solidly theoretical, the fact that the researchers’ model could one day be tested is “most physicists’ dream,” Liu said.
Originally published on LiveScience.
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